The National Advanced Manufacturing Conference was held in Beijing not long ago. Convened at the opening of the 15th Five-Year Plan period, this important meeting underscored the weight of advanced manufacturing in the overall cause of Chinese-style modernization and set a clear direction for continuing to expand and strengthen advanced manufacturing.
The outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan proposes maintaining a reasonable share of manufacturing and building a modern industrial system with advanced manufacturing as its backbone. At present, China's manufacturing sector is in a critical period of moving from large to strong, with value added accounting for nearly 30% of the global total. Data show that from January to August this year, value added of industrial enterprises above designated size grew 5.3% year on year, and new growth drivers such as high-tech manufacturing and digital product manufacturing contributed more than half of that growth.
However, the development of China's advanced manufacturing still faces deep-seated challenges, including a low degree of alignment between factor supply and industrial demand, uneven regional development, and weak coordination in industrial organization.
Cross-sector integration is an important driving force for the development of advanced manufacturing. A pair of AI glasses carries artificial intelligence, sensors, wireless communications and other technologies, integrating translation, navigation, speech recognition and other services; Hefei Luogang Park brings together more than 10 typical scenarios such as sightseeing and cultural tourism and high-speed inspection, giving new technologies room to be applied. In recent years, breakthroughs and cross-applications of technologies in different fields such as information technology, new materials and biotechnology have spawned a number of highly integrated innovative products and comprehensive innovative scenarios. Many places in China are actively exploring practices, seeking to cultivate new industrial momentum through scenario opening and the breaking down of barriers between business formats, and to forge differentiated upgrading paths.
Hubei is pushing integration from a single field to the overall picture, explicitly "promoting the deep integration of advanced manufacturing and modern services, and driving the linked development of the real economy with the digital economy and the primary, secondary and tertiary industries"; Guangdong has proposed "5 pluses" and "5 manufacturings," including "advanced manufacturing plus services," translating high-end, intelligent, green and integrated development into an executable set of "industrial grammar."
Looking ahead, to continue expanding and strengthening advanced manufacturing, breakthroughs in single-point technologies are important, but integrated development thinking is even more critical. Business entities need to actively connect with digital technology, urban scenarios, livelihood needs and the global market, and use cross-sector innovation to restructure products, business formats and business models. Industrial development, in turn, must continue to break down barriers between industries, regions and supply and demand, and build an integration ecosystem of "technology empowerment, scenario implementation, industrial clustering and service support."
Deepening cross-sector exploration in frontier fields, promoting deep coupling between manufacturing and artificial intelligence, biotechnology and other areas, and continuing to cultivate new growth points for future industries.